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It's literally Arch Linux but with an easy bundled installer and a couple of small tools you'll forget about.
I am using it until the archinstall script gets easier for dual-boot, encrypted BTRFS configs.
I kinda wished the EndeavourOS team made efforts to improve archinstall and simply bundled their couple extra tools as that, extra tools for easier Arch Linux usage, instead of branding it all like a new distro.
Endeavouros uses calamares. They just make it possible to install arch very easily and with a gui. What's the advantage of archinstall over it? Eos isn't too different from arch. It's arch with a gui installer.
Yes! That's the point. It's just Arch with a GUI installer, quite literally. So, why not simply make the archinstall script better? Or simply make an installer for Arch Linux? It's like you take your grandma's cookies and put a sticker of your face.
They do ship some other stuff as well.
Arch Linux GUI does exist though.
It's a couple of extra tools they bundle. Most of them you'll never use.
I made an install script for encrypted Btrfs Arch Linux, systemd-boot and KDE Plasma in case you want to have a look. gitlab.com/dataprolet/arch
Does not work for dualbooting, right?
Why would it not? I think maybe a few times in 20 years I’ve come across an installer that didn’t let you do custom partitioning.
Read the README.md.
Here's the thing with Arch-based distros: they aren't more stable than Arch, and Arch breaks. Fixing Arch is often possible, but requires Terminal skills. You mentioned you want Arch because of the AUR, why not try Distrobox? It's a tool for integrating containers (and their apps) with the "base" system. With a few commands, create an Arch container, then just use your favourite AUR wrapper (like yay or pacman) as you would on a regular Arch system and you may need to run `distrobox-export ' in the container. Your apps will just show up like any other apps.
If you want something that "just works" any Arch base won't be a good idea in my opinion. I love Arch but there will be certain things to figure out from time to time and for someone with little experience they can be tough! For you usecase I would recommend Fedora, that's a lot more up to date but not a rolling realease and tends to just work for me.
The out of date package problem you're running into is because Mint is based on the LTS version of Ubuntu. This means that it's set up for long term service and stability. All well and good if that's what you're after.
As to your problem, I'm not big on Endeavor - or any Arch based distro - for folks who are new to Linux. Unless you're willing to take the time to use Arch itself and set up your system, and learn how it all comes together, you're better off not using Arch. I know I'll get shouted down for this, but IMHO, all of the easy install Arch based distros are terrible for people new to linux.
If your biggest issue is that the software versions aren't as up to date as you'd like, then all you really need to do is switch to a non-LTS. I'd recommend Fedora. I use it myself, and it's easy to set up, works great out of the box, and is up to date. They come out with a new version twice a year, and upgrades run smoothly.
If you're really focused on a rolling release, though, I'd suggest looking at OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It's rolling, super stable, and has a fantastic community. Their Yast tools are famous and really impressive.
Alternately, take the time to install a proper Arch setup. You'll learn a ton, and find out that all that maintenance stuff you feel like you don't have time to do isn't that big a deal, really.
Fedora is ok, idk what it is but I have never had a good experience with Fedora. If you need to install anything outside of the default repos it can be a major pain and while yum is ancient and rock solid, it's replacement with dnf, is terrible and slow. OpenSuse is also rock solid but I didn't like the install experience and while yast is good, you're still limited by the repos. Also OpenSuse is getting rid of, I think it's called leap or something, which I think tumbleweed uses as a base. It's unfortunate but I think the best option for most new Linux users is simply the latest Ubuntu. I hate snaps as much as the next guy, but their packages are fairly up to date. Outside of that you have the niche distros like MX and Garuda, but even those are just Debian and Arch. The other option is LMDE by the Linux mint team but idk how often that's updated.
Tumbleweed is a snapshot of factory. Leap is based on SLES which is based on Tumbleweed. The next SLES release is likely to be immutable and there will be something like Leap but it could have a different name.
I use EndeavourOS and OpenSuse tumbleweed myself, and I'd caution you about using endeavour. It's a great OS that I personally love but there will be manual interventions you'll have to keep track of, and implement. Maybe twice yearly. Like the grub issue, or the repo migration for two recent examples.
OpenSuse tumbleweed however is a rolling release distro that's more stable, takes little in the way of manual interventions, and is quite sleek out of the box. I use it as a work partition for freelance dev work personally.
I love endeavour, but it can take some more babysitting than other distros as it's essentially just a really good graphical arch installer
Endeavour is fairly easy to run and maintain, aside from not having a GUI package manager installed by default (I say this as someone who has been running it for about 2 years now, and still considers themselves a Linux noob)
One underrated feature is the Welcome tab, which also notifies you if there's some critical error in the latest update so that you know to use caution and take certain steps when updating
Other than that, running yay or sudo pacman -Syu is most of the maintenance you'll need to do
My honest opinion is it is a nice Arch based distro with a gui installer
I've been using EndeavourOS for about 1.5 years on my laptop and about a year on my desktop. I've been using it as arch but pre-configured. I believe EndeavourOS uses the same repositories as stock Arch, with an extra EndeavourOS repo added for theming and some convenience tools they use.
The UI might not be as easy as Manjaro (I don't think they pre-install a GUI for pacman/yay, but it isn't hard to install one like pamac). Other than that if you use a desktop like Gnome or KDE and install a pacman frontend you probably won't need to interact with the terminal more than you want. Honestly I think EndeavourOS is a great place to start if you want to learn more about Linux without having to spend the time configuring your system from scratch.
It's great. I'm on vanilla Arch now, but EOS would be my first choice if I ever wanted to change to another arch-based distro. The only time I ever encountered any issue (that's not my fault) was the grub issue last year iirc. Other than that, it's been pretty smooth. It's basically Arch with a few QOL features preinstalled.
Edit: just like you, I was on Mint for years before switching to EOS. It's easy, don't worry. You'll want to start reading, though. The wiki and aur are great.
EndevourOS is excellent. It has been very stable for me. It is easy to install. Your problem will not be out of date packages for sure.
That said:
If either of those things bother you, they may be a problem.
Updating packages is reliable and painless but a chore you need to get in the habit of doing. I suspect you would get more problems if you let it go too long. On the upside, as it is a rolling release, you never have an “upgrade” to go through.
I'm running EndeavourOS on a little Ryzen box I got for a desktop. It's fine. They have their own mirrors hosting some different core packages than base Arch, and it seems pretty stable. I haven't had any issues other than some missing PGP keys once.
That said: I've been using Arch-based distros for a while - I have a half dozen different servers running Arch, and a laptop running Artix. After installation, I haven't used any EndeavourOS tooling. I do most maintenance from the command line, and I use a tiling window manager. So my experience doesn't really stress test the EneavourOS configuration, or any of the tooling it provides.
TLDR; It's stable enough.
I've been using it since it succeeded Antergos (2019ish) and I've really enjoyed it, I use it on most of my systems! It has really sane defaults and makes for a good Arch experience that doesn't involve setting things up yourself. If you like XFCE, they have the best out of the box theming I've seen a distro have for it, but there are other DEs that you can pick (I think you need internet access during the install IIRC).
It has its own repository that has some nice apps in it (like AUR helpers). The community around the distro is also really good, whenever I've come across an issue posted on the forums everyone seems really chill and noob friendly.
Other than that, it's basically a GUI Arch installer (an amazing one at that!) that doesn't get in your way and it just works. There's been probably one problem, in the four years I've used it, that wasn't caused by me breaking things (the grub incident), but the distro's response to that was very well done.
The only other distros I use are Arch and Debian, but EndeavourOS is always my recommendation for people newer to Linux. It just works.
I am very happy with Endeavour, have been using it for two years now and have had no problems with it.
It's exactly as most people describe: Arch with a Calamares installer, for all the good and bad that entails. I've never been sold on Arch for daily driver use since stability and simplicity is paramount to me, so I tend to use Fedora as a relatively up-to-date distro that I can generally trust not to totally break.
However, if you really want to jump in both feet first into troubleshooting and learning Linux, Arch and EndeavourOS are fantastic. Neither holds your hand too much out of the box but they also have an excellent and helpful community and documentation if you run into trouble or don't know how to do something. Just… you have to be willing to deal with that kinda stuff, and not everyone is (I'm certainly not).
I’ve been using it for a while now. It’s generally good. I’ve been facing random system crash issues during gaming or using Firefox or background steam. I have an amd 6800xt and don’t have this issue on fedora.
It's great if what you want is Arch Linux and everything that comes with it. Things might break from time to time.
If you want something more stable I'd go with Fedora or Debian.
It's very good but as it's Arch based, there will be some manual work required. If you want to try a rolling release without the fiddling, try openSUSE Tumbleweed.
I've been using EndeavourOS for a little over a year, and I am very pleased with my experience so far. The only issue I've encountered was a GRUB problem, which I had to fix manually using the terminal.
It's my favorite Linux distro nowadays. It has the DIY element of Arch but without the complexities of its installation process. Effectively that has allowed me to use it as a daily driver on my main machine, but also a stripped down OS for an emulation console with a wide selection of packages. I wasn't happy with the whole grub fiasco, but the fix was easy and it was nice to see that they added systemd-boot as an option. Overall, it's pretty easy for me to recommend.
"Always configuring" isn't what Arch requires. It requires you to be tolerant of every so often dealing with a bug or two. Currently, the Arch-packaged version of Waybar has a regression which prints fractional seconds when using %T or %S specifiers. A tad annoying, and I could fix it by switching to waybar-git, where it's been patched. But that hasn't hit my threshold of annoyance, as I bounce between Sway and KDE.
The grub issue was a bigger deal, and while I knew how to resolve it (liveboot → lsblk and fdisk -l got me all the info I needed, then cryptsetup, mount -o subvol=@, arch-chroot, grub-install) the EOS blog had a nice guide.
But the reason why I chose it? Firewalld and Pipewire by default, customizable welcome app, and pretty simple otherwise.
NixOS will probably fully convert me in a year or two, but I've greatly enjoyed my time on Endeavour.
As someone who's used it for at least 3 years, go for it. However, it requires lots of configuration to get it the way you like it, so openSUSE Tumbleweed is probably the better pick for you.
It also comes with cool utilities like nvidia-inst (archinstall advocates, write that down) and the community's great too.
Been using it as my daily driver for ~2 years now and it's been great. The arch-keyring needed to be updated first was annoying but I believe they solved that in the last year since I haven't had any issues with that.
Pretty awesome experience; if you're new to Arch and Linux are both great ways combined to learn about it. It did break on me but nothing super problematic.
If you don't auto update or update weekly you'll have a pretty fine experience.
I picked it to enforce me to learn the way of Linux and or Arch specific since the aur and wiki are pretty nice.
Though do come from relative mild Linux experience and a great Windows knowledge from my job as sysadmin.
Do wanna see how I could incorporate more Linux into my environment for tasks.
I've used Arch on all of my systems for almost 9 years now. Installing it from scratch takes me 15 minutes, without any pre-existing configs, because I'm just familiar with the process, and what I want on my finished system. It works, and it works well.
That said, Endeavour is great. To me, it's a no-bullshit Arch-based (important distinction) distribution, and the "sane defaults", if you will, are reasonable to me. I don't necessarily agree with all of their config choices, but that's just to be expected on Linux on general.
I would definitely recommend this to practically anyone
When I built my new PC (January last year) with an Intel 12th gen I first wanted to install Debian, cause I've used it basically ever since I've used Linux, but the kernel shipped with Debian did not support Intel 12th gen yet, so I was looking for another distro with up to date kernels/packages and stumbled upon manjaro, but quickly realised that it had some issues, than went for a manual arch install just for the sake of it, some stuff broke and I couldn't be bothered to fix it since I didn't do much on the system set anyways, I kept my home partition and installed endeavour and have been using it ever since on all my machines (with the exception of a short trip to fedora on my work laptop. It is just arch and basically any thing on the arch wiki applies, the only difference is some sane defaults and packages/services you'd most likely want to install and configure on your arch system anyways, they're just using the arch repos and have added a repo of their own with some "bundled" packages like DEs/WMs and AUR helpers
I agree with everything you said other than I would advise against using pamac. It will cause fewer problems than on Manjaro ( as EOS uses the real Arch repos ) but it may still cause problems.
Its is pretty solid choice for arch users . It is like what mx linux is like to debian.Its good for beginner to try out arch though when you are using arch you kind of have to be always ready if something goes wrong.
I haven't used it, but it seems like a thin wrapper over Arch so it should work pretty well.
If you don't want to tinker but want a rolling release, give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a shot. It has a lot going for it that other rolling releases tend to either not do or leave to the user, such as:
And packages are usually about as new as Arch, sometimes newer. I used Arch for ~5 years and Tumbleweed almost as long, and Tumbleweed seems to work better for me (less manual intervention, less breakage, etc). If you want a custom package, it doesn't support the AUR, but it has a user repository that has pretty much everything I wanted from the AUR anyway.
Arch is great if you want to tinker and make a super customized setup, but if you just want newer packages, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora is probably a better option.
I use it on my gaming laptop. I've been using Linux in various ways since the nineties and just wanted to install Arch easily while I was brewing coffee, I had it ready to play games from my old Steam SSD within 20min. It installed proprietary NV drivers and keeps them up to date with new versions and kernels without me having to bother with that silliness, likewise for certain multimedia codecs that you have to go look for with other distributions, which is a bother.
However, I had to setup btrfs-assistant+grub-btrfs+btrfsmaintenance scripts myself, I wish it had an install option for that and I'm thinking Garuda might be a better option for this reason as that's configured by default for new users.
It also lacks a GUI app installer, it can be bewildering for newcomers to search for packages with yay and understand pacman/yay stuff. There are ways, like octopi to remedy that but it's not there by default.
TLDR: As an experienced user I enjoy it, I didn't have to waste a lot of time and attn to install and it works well.
I've been using it daily for about a year and I have no complaints.
It's great! I'm using it as my daily driver on my desktop. Haven't run into any issues so far. It comes with some handy tools like a one click updater. So general maintenance is very easy.
There are people in this thread saying things may break in Arch based distros, but I couldn't disagree more. From my personal experience Arch is very stable and since I started using it 3y ago it has been rock solid. When I was using Ubuntu I sometimes had to deal with dependency conflicts and missing packages from the official repo that was very annoying to solve
Ubuntu doesn't run into dependency issues if you stick with the official repos, just like Arch won't if you don't enable the AUR. If you add external repositories or enable the AUR, all bets are off.
The AUR also suffers from abandonment and dependency issues, sometimes blocking major upgrades. It all depends on what software you want to use.
Arch with a graphical installer. That's literally all there is to it. It's pretty decent imo
You should prepare yourself to be the car enthusiast of computer users when thinking of using Linux at all, especially for gaming. You are the car but of computing when you dip into Arch based or other similar distributions. You will spend time looking at parts of the OS most people take for granted and can spend as much time as you want fiddling with tiny bits of the OS to tube it to whatever you want. So really it depends on what experience you want.
Endeavour is great, but not always smooth sailing.
However, I also don’t have the time to be always configuring my OS and just want something that works well out of the box.
You might have some of that ahead. I had to dive into configs to get things like trackpad scrolling and gestures work on my laptop. I eventually switched to Fedora on that machine when an update broke the bootloader and I couldn't be arsed to fix it.
I have Arch on my notebook Sway and on my PC Endeavour OS first SSD Gnome, second KDE. Instalations was without any problems, minimal apps, no any problem. Recommend!!! (Best os, simple to install, very good community, maintenance and always up to date.